An IndustryWizards.com Exclusive Story
Written by Louis Sirico

The skeptics said it could not be done.  Yet, last week I had the honor of having a personal demonstration of the world’s first passive ultra wide band integrated circuit (IC): the Tagent Talon™ – an engineering accomplishment 12 years in the making.

“We call it a no-battery active tag”, declares Geoff Zawolkow, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Tagent Corporation.  “Just as an active tag stores power in a battery, we harness RF energy and store it in an onboard capacitor directly on the IC.  The IC uses the stored power to transmit data.”

If that’s not amazing enough, the antenna is directly on the chip, a patented design and the first of its kind in a commercially available product.  Zawolkow adds, “When you’re done with chip fabrication, the tag is done.  There is no additional packaging process, no external antenna, antenna attachment costs or failures due to damaging the antenna or breaking the antenna connection; no external connections at all.”  There is also no problem with orientation sensitivity.

The IC is currently 2.3 mm square on their current prototype silicon, but will be even smaller in the upcoming production run.  It stores 128 bits of read-only data, ideal for a unique identifier.

A Passive 3-D Real Time Location System

The IC works in conjunction with power nodes and readers.  The inexpensive power nodes provide RF energy to ICs up to 1 m away.  The readers detect tags up to 10 m away with 25 cm of accuracy.  Because of the high transmission data rate, the reader performs 10,000 tag acquisition cycles per second which yields approximately 2,500 tag reads per second, making this a viable solution for extremely dense tag environments.

Paul Lovoi, CEO of Tagent adds, “The Tagent system provides all the functionality of an active tag system with the form factor and price point of a passive tag.  The small size and robust nature of the Tagent tags finally makes item level location and tracking possible.”  The tags do have a durable form factor with operating temperatures from -40° to 40° C and storage temperatures from -80° to 85° C.

The system has been tested in environments with other battery-powered UWB solutions, both RTLS and non-RTLS, and coexists well.  Due to the small amounts of data and fast communication rate, no operational interference has been seen. In fact the Tagent reader is capable of reading battery operated pulsed UWB from other manufacturers as well as the no battery tags from Tagent.

Working with a 2.3mm² Tag

The manufacturer attaches the IC to whatever is to be tagged.  Since the tag is self contained with the antenna-on-chip, there is an extremely high tolerance for placement, unlike traditional ICs that must be connected to an antenna or strap, which requires a great deal of precision. The ICs will be available on a variety of label stock; an example is pictured – right.

Real World Applications

Tagent is working with customers on a number of applications, including embedding their IC on a larger IC or circuit board for tracking and work-in-progress management.  “Our small form factor and 10 m read range makes it possible to build asset tracking solutions that were not previously possible”, explains Zawolkow. The tags could be molded right into the plastic chip package or blood vial during the manufacturing process.  This just was not possible with previous technologies.

Their first solution is used to track vials of blood.   A Tagent IC is embedded in a standard blood vial label that is simply wrapped around the vial. 
The IC makes it possible to differentiate every vial as well as find any particular vial.  Most importantly for the lab application the tags ensure that the correct vial is being processed.

Pricing

While pricing has not been finalized it is expected that the tags will be priced at about 30¢ each, the power nodes at about $50 each and readers about $2,000 each.